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ART; Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?

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Even after the latest round of tests, the sculpture remains an enigma. The larger-than-life-size marble version of a naked youth, or kouros, stands in a laboratory behind the J. Paul Getty Museum. Since its arrival here in late 1983, the Getty kouros has caused scholars, dealers and scientists to choose sides in a heated public debate about whether the work was carved by a late sixth century B.C. Greek sculptor or by a modern forger.

If authentic, the kouros is one of the most important works of ancient art to enter the United States since World War II. But it has no documented history, or provenance, and its stylistic links are to a curiously divergent spectrum of genuine kouroi. Its pasty surface is an anomaly, and it is the only kouros of this period known to be carved from marble from the Greek island of Thasos. Batteries of scientific tests were conducted and experts from around the world invited to the Getty before the museum, relying heavily on scientific evidence, decided in favor of the work's authenticity and bought it for around $9 million. It went on view in October 1986.

But when an unquestionably fake torso bearing similarities to the Getty kouros turned up last year, the museum decided to think again. It bought the fake, and removed the kouros from the galleries to the laboratory so that more tests, involving independent scholars and scientists, could be undertaken. The museum went to extraordinary lengths and expense to try to discover the truth about the sculpture.

Now an important result of a new investigation has come in: scientific findings on which the Getty relied heavily in deciding to buy the kouros turn out not to be as secure as the museum had thought. The new evidence has caused the Getty's curator of antiquities, Marion True, who believed in the work's authenticity, to reconsider her position. "Everything about the kouros is problematic," she said.

"I always considered scientific opinion more objective than esthetic judgments," Ms. True added. "Now I realize I was wrong." Increasingly over the last half-century, scientific and technical analysis has usurped connoisseurship in determining whether a work of art is ancient or modern. Supposedly hard facts have come to take priority over the subjective views of archeologists and art historians, on which museums and collectors traditionally relied.

But as the kouros illustrates, objectivity is a chimera, even in this age of electron microscopy, thermoluminescence and carbon-14 dating. Science may be no more certain than the connoisseur's eye in judging a work's authenticity. Even Jerry Podany, the Getty's antiquities conservator -- who, unlike Ms. True, remains convinced that the technical evidence still supports the kouros as genuine -- concedes: "Science isn't the final word. It is flexible and changeable as new evidence comes up."

It might seem simple to discover the source of an object as big and important as the Getty kouros. Yet the path that brought the kouros to the museum is strewn with rumors, false documents and shady characters. In the antiquities market, where objects smuggled from countries like Greece and Turkey are sometimes sold with fictionalized histories and forged papers, trustworthy information can be as rare as a sculpture by Phidias. Savvy, well-connected collectors and curators often know how to unearth the truth about a work. But the origin of the kouros has proved to be an intractable puzzle.

The story goes back eight years, to when a Basel dealer named Gianfranco Becchina offered the work to the Getty's curator of antiquities, Jiri Frel. Mr. Frel brought the work to Malibu to be examined, and presented papers to the museum's trustees that he said vouched for the sculpture's authenticity and provenance.

The documents traced the work to the collection of a Geneva physician, Jean Lauffenberger, who had purportedly bought it around 1930 from a Greek dealer. A letter in German, dated March 12, 1952, to Lauffenberger from the late Ernst Langlotz, an eminent scholar of archaic sculpture, linked the kouros stylistically to the so-called Anavysos youth, a famous archaic sculpture in the National Museum in Athens. A second letter to Lauffenberger, in French, dated March 20, 1952, is from a Herman Rosenberg, who writes that Langlotz had repeated to him that the kouros was "a masterpiece of Greek archaic sculpture of the greatest rarity." Yet another letter, dated 1955, was from a Basel artisan named A. E. Bigenwald, whom Lauffenberger supposedly consulted about repairs on the kouros.

Despite these supporting documents, doubts about the object's authenticity quickly began to circulate. Rumors spread in the antiquities community that it came from the workshop of a Roman forger. One Getty's trustee, the Italian art historian Federico Zeri, vigorously insisted that it was a fake. Every archeologist who passed through the museum was asked for an opinion.

The kouros posed obvious problems. It was a captivating and immensely skilled example of carved marble sculpture, obviously the work of an artist of the first order. But it also seemed a pastiche of stylistic details, making it difficult to date and trace to a particular ancient Greek workshop.

The treatment of the locks of hair suggested it came from the early sixth century B.C. But the sensitively modeled feet, face and abdomen suggested a much later date. The muscular thighs and compressed buttocks recalled kouroi made in Corinth; the feet and base recalled a well-known sculpture from Boeotia. The narrow, sloping shoulders and slender waist looked odd for an archaic kouros, as did the uniformity of the incisions between the fingers and buttocks.

Most curious of all was the chalky surface. Tests were done on the marble. Norman Herz, a professor of geology at the University of Georgia, measured the carbon and oxygen isotope ratios, and traced the stone to the island of Thasos. Very few kouroi have been tested to determine what quarries their marble came from, so it is possible that other Thasian marble archaic kouroi exist. But with the exception of a few pieces on Thasos itself, including a single colossal unfinished sculpture, no other kouros of this stone has yet been identified.

The second test was by Stanley Margolis, a geology professor at the University of California at Davis, and it proved decisive in the Getty's thinking. He showed that the marble was a kind known as dolomite (calcium magnesium carbonate), and that the surface of the sculpture had undergone a process called de-dolomitization, in which the magnesium content had been leached out, leaving a crust of calcite, along with other minerals. Mr. Margolis determined that this process could occur only over the course of many centuries and under natural conditions. It could not be duplicated by a forger.

Stylistic problems may have made the work difficult to trace but they did not rule out the possibility that the kouros was genuine. Scholars seemed divided in their opinion. Some privately expressed their doubts to the Getty. But among those supporting authenticity were experts like Brunilde Ridgway of Bryn Mawr College, who said at the time that she "felt perfectly comfortable with it as an archaic Greek statue." And Mr. Margolis's finding on the de-dolomitization process tipped the scales. In 1985 the museum's trustees -- minus Mr. Zeri, who had retired from the board -- decided to buy the sculpture.

It did not take long before troubles surfaced. Mr. Frel, the curator, had been removed from his post a year earlier, when the Getty discovered that, among other things, he had participated in a tax scam to inflate the value of archeological material donated to the museum. He had also recommended that the museum buy expensive objects, like the so-called Skopas head, which turned out to be fake.

But it was only after Mr. Frel had been dismissed and the kouros had been bought that Arthur Houghton, the acting curator of antiquities before Ms. True's appointment, raised questions about the provenance papers for the kouros. Mr. Frel was known by the Getty to have fabricated provenances for other purchases. (Since leaving the museum and moving to Rome, he has made no public statements; he could not be reached for comment by The Times.)

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Following up on the curator's suggestion, the Getty hired an independent expert in document analysis from Germany to look at the papers, and he concluded that they were indeed fakes. For one thing, a bank account referred to in the letterhead of the 1955 Bigenwald was not opened until 1963. For another, the postal code on the Langlotz letter dated 1952 did not exist until 20 years later.

But forged provenance papers still did not mean that the kouros was fake. After all, documents are forged for genuine artifacts that have been smuggled. Before it bought the kouros, the museum had checked with the Greek Government to make sure that the country had no record of the work as stolen. The Getty decided that the fake documents were not reason enough to ask Mr. Becchina, the Basel dealer who had sold the kouros, to take back the sculpture. (Attempts by The Times to reach Mr. Becchina were unsuccessful.)

Then last April, an independent scholar in London, Jeffrey Spier, was shown a photograph of a fake torso of a kouros, belonging to a Basel dealer (not Mr. Becchina), that looked similar to the Getty's sculpture. Mr. Spier was told that the two works had been made in the same workshop in Rome during the early 1980's, and that they had been carved from the same block of marble. He contacted Ms. True at the Getty and together they went to Switzerland. A sample of the torso was taken for testing, and in late May the results came back: like the kouros, the torso was made of Thasian dolomitic marble.

The coincidence was amazing, and the museum, to its credit, moved swiftly to buy the fake torso. If the kouros was fake, the Getty wanted to make sure that this key piece of evidence would not be lost or destroyed. The museum also wanted to compare the sculptures more closely.

They were by no means identical, and to see the two side by side in the laboratory can be to miss the connection entirely. The torso is much smaller and more crudely sculptured, and the patina on its surface -- produced by the sort of acid bath that fakers typically use -- is completely different from the pasty surface of the kouros. But correspondences between the two can be detected in areas like the treatment of the sloping shoulders, the abdomen and the hands. The Getty also acquired the head and legs that belonged with the fake torso, and other links between the forged sculpture and the Getty kouros became apparent.

Martin Robertson, formerly Lincoln Professor at Oxford University, one of the scholars who spoke in favor of the kouros when the Getty bought it, has seen the torso and changed his view. "I thought it was all right then, but now I'm pretty much convinced it's all wrong," he said. "There are resemblances that seem more easily explicable if both are modern and not ancient."

The museum asked dealers and scholars for whatever information they had about the two works, and particularly about the rumor of a Roman forger. Nothing solid turned up. A team of scientists from the Getty Conservation Institute went to Thasos to sample the quarries there and to try to locate the one from which the sculptures came. They have not yet found it. Meanwhile, scientists were invited to re-examine all the evidence.

And recently a marine chemist from the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, Calif., Miriam Castner, has made the crucial discovery that, contrary to what Mr. Margolis asserted, the process of de-dolomitization can be duplicated in a laboratory. Mr. Margolis has since confirmed her results. "Obviously this process is not as simple as we had thought," he said.

He points out that what Ms. Castner produced does not precisely duplicate what is seen on the kouros and on ancient, naturally weathered dolomite. But he acknowledges that "de-dolomitization can occur under different circumstances. The scientific process is an evolutionary one. It's been six or seven years since we did our work, and we're asking questions now we didn't ask before. We clearly have to investigate more."

The laboratory procedure is so complicated and time-consuming that a forger would be unlikely to stumble onto it. Still, perhaps the most crucial piece of scientific evidence supporting the authenticity of the kouros has been seriously shaken.

Would a forger who had made the effort to carve so extraordinary an object have subjected the work to an experimental procedure, the effects of which are invisible to the naked eye? Mr. Podany, the Getty's antiquities conservator, believes the scenario is far-fetched. "The statement that de-dolomitization could never be reproduced was in error," he said. "But when you consider a forger actually repeating the procedure you begin to leave the realm of practicality."

He added that new analyses of the proportions and construction of the kouros, and of the marks from the tools with which it was carved, have argued in favor of authenticity. "Making microscopic examinations of the work, we have found no slip-ups, no inconsistencies with archaic carving techniques," Mr. Podany said. "To reach a conclusion about its authenticity, you have to take together all the evidence, not just de-dolomitization."

Ms. True is more wary: "I worry about underestimating the ability of forgers," she said. "We think they're not subtle. But why wouldn't they know a great deal about things like ancient carving techniques, especially since they may profit greatly from such knowledge?"

She continues: "This has been an extremely interesting and trying experience. It makes you question your faith in science, and your trust in people who turn out to have lied or kept quiet about what they know. There really seems to be a conspiracy of silence about the kouros."

From Mr. Podany's perspective, the case proves that scientists and scholars "clearly have a lot to learn about each other." He concludes: "People who expect we will someday come up with something that says the Getty kouros is absolutely ancient or absolutely fake are probably expecting something that will never happen."

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 1991, on Page 2002001 of the National edition with the headline: ART; Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe